shortformblog:

A Guatemalan court has convicted former dictator Efrain Rios Montt on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, sentencing him to 80 years in prison.

The 86-year-old former general is the first former Latin American leader ever found guilty of such a charge.

A three-judge tribunal issued the verdict after the nearly two-month trial in which dozens of victims testified about horrific atrocities.

Rios Montt denies having knowledge of the massacres that happened involving indigenous people while he was in power.

(via fylatinamericanhistory)

(Source: ogshygirl, via fylatinamericanhistory)

(Source: fylatinamericanhistory, via fylatinamericanhistory)

invisiblelad:

bapgeek:

Side note: This nation has a history of seeking ways to disarm black people/people of color.

I think this is a fitting response to the absolute moron who was talking about Dr. King, slavery and gun ownership earlier in the week. 

From the Article: 

The real reason the Second Amendment was ratified, and why it says “State” instead of “Country” (the Framers knew the difference - see the 10th Amendment), was to preserve the slave patrol militias in the southern states, which was necessary to get Virginia’s vote.  Founders Patrick Henry, George Mason, and James Madison were totally clear on that … and we all should be too.

In the beginning, there were the militias. In the South, they were also called the “slave patrols,” and they were regulated by the states. 

In Georgia, for example, a generation before the American Revolution, laws were passed in 1755 and 1757 that required all plantation owners or their male white employees to be members of the Georgia Militia, and for those armed militia members to make monthly inspections of the quarters of all slaves in the state.  The law defined which counties had which armed militias and even required armed militia members to keep a keen eye out for slaves who may be planning uprisings. 

As Dr. Carl T. Bogus wrote for the University of California Law Review in 1998, “The Georgia statutes required patrols, under the direction of commissioned militia officers, to examine every plantation each month and authorized them to search ‘all Negro Houses for offensive Weapons and Ammunition’ and to apprehend and give twenty lashes to any slave found outside plantation grounds.”

It’s the answer to the question raised by the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Django Unchained when he asks, “Why don’t they just rise up and kill the whites?”  If the movie were real, it would have been a purely rhetorical question, because every southerner of the era knew the simple answer: Well regulated militias kept the slaves in chains.

(via descomic)

6stronghands:

Earth’s oldest trees are almost unfathomably ancient

via io9

burnedshoes:

© Gordon Parks, 1961, “The Flavio Story”, Rio de Janeiro

#1: Twelve-year-old Flavio da Silva feeding his brother, Zacarias
#2: Flavio is weary from caring for his brothers and sisters
#3: Flavio’s brother Mario, crying after being bitten by a dog
#4: Flavio amuses smaller brothers and sisters

In 1961, Parks did a series for LIFE on the slums of Brazil and found himself in what he describes as “dead center in the worst poverty I have ever encountered—in the favela of Catacumba, a desolate mountainside outside of Rio de Janeiro.” In true Parks fashion, instead of giving a broad view without much depth, he focused on an individual affected by the larger story.

Find the whole LIFE magazine story here.

At just 12, Flavio da Silva was already dying, from tuberculosis. Flavio lived with his parents, brothers and sisters in a one-room shack. The images Parks created while living with the da Silva family illustrated the family’s reliance on their dying son. “What Flavio cared most about,” says Parks, “was that his younger brothers and sisters were taken care of. It was very noble of him. I definitely learned more from Flavio about character than Flavio learned from me.”

“I am not afraid of death.” he explained earnestly to Parks. “But what will they do after?”

After the story ran, LIFE readers contributed money to help with Flavio’s medical care. Parks says that people sent in roughly $30,000 to bring Flavio to America. “I went back to Brazil and the doctors told me that Flavio would die on my hands if I took him to America. I took him anyway and after living there for two years, he was cured.” When Flavio went back home to Brazil, Parks bought Flavio’s father a new truck with the money everyone had sent in, and then LIFE donated $25,000 so that Parks could help the family buy a new home.

When Parks checked on Flavio 15 years later, he found a hard-working family man—with an almost obsessive desire to return to the United States. Flavio believed that he was still remembered and that he still had friends who would help him make something more of himself.

Today, the obsession has faded. (…) Due to personal problems in his life, Flavio lost touch with Parks in 1987, but was reunited with the now 84-year-old photographer by telephone in 1996. They talked about Flavio’s family and his hard times and about the chances of getting together again.

“I’ll never forget you,” Flavio told the man who made him famous.

Parks went back to Brazil to visit Flavio for an special HBO was doing on the photographer in November 2000. Flavio has two young sons, a daughter and a grandchild. “Flavio’s very gracious,” Parks concludes. “He doesn’t beg for help or anything. He gave me a beautiful Bible when I went back to see him. He wants me to keep it for the rest of my life, which I will.” (+, +)

O CRUZEIRO vs LIFE MAGAZINE

Flavio was subjected to some kind of propaganda battle: On initial publication of Parks’s photographs, the Brazilian magazine “O Cruzeiro”, recognizing the documentation of Brazilian poverty as politically laden, “rushed one of its own photographers to New York City to do a similar story on a Puerto Rican family in the Wall Street district, and it depicted a sleeping child with cockroaches crawling over its face, and another child crying from hunger”.

TIME, sibling to LIFE in Luce’s media empire, quickley encountered and revealed the O Cruzeiro story as fabrication. Parks remarks the irony that “O Cruzeiro had felt it necessary to go to such lenghts. If it had gone to New York’s Harlem or Chicago’s South Side, they could have found a story as genuinely tragic as the one of the Catacumba”. (source)

   (source: Brazilian magazine “O Cruzeiro” / Oct. 7, 1961)

You can find more scans of the “O Cruzeiro” story here.

The quotes come from the documentary “Half Past Autumn: The Life and Work of Gordon Parks”. Read here a pdf excerpt from Park’s autobiography about meeting Flavio (thanks to Iconic Photos).

Find previous posts about Gordon Parks here and here.

(Source: burnedshoes, via fylatinamericanhistory)

archaeologicalnews:

The last of the artefacts taken from Machu Picchu by American archaeologist who rediscovered the Inca citadel have been returned to Peru.

More than 35,000 pottery fragments and other pieces were flown from Yale University to the Andean city of Cusco.

They had been taken to the US by archaeologist Hiram Bingham, who brought the site to international attention in 1911.

The move completes a deal signed in 2010, following legal action by Peru.

It argued that Bingham had only been loaned the artefacts.

The American archaeologist and historian took to Yale some 46,000 ceramics, bone fragments and metal pieces.

The first and second lots of artefacts arrived back in Peru last year.

The best pieces will now be on display in a newly built museum in nearby Cusco. Read more.

(via fylatinamericanhistory)

ancientart:

The Codex Zouche-Nuttall, pre-Columbian piece of Mixtec writing, currently located at the British Museum, London. Late Postclassic period, from Mexico.

It is one of three codices that record the genealogies, alliances and conquests of several 11th- and 12th-century rulers of a small Mixtec city-state in highland Oaxaca, the Tilantongo kingdom, especially under the leadership of the warrior Lord Eight Deer Jaguar Claw (who died early twelfth century at the age of fifty-two).

Artifact statement from the the British Museum:

This is one of a small number of known Mexican codices (screenfold manuscript books) dating to pre-Hispanic times. It is made of deer skin and comprises 47 leaves. The Codex contains two narratives: one side of the document relates the history of important centres in the Mixtec region, while the other, starting at the opposite end, records the genealogy, marriages and political and military feats of the Mixtec ruler, Eight Deer Jaguar-Claw. This ruler is depicted at top centre, next to his calendric name (8 circles and a deer’s head).

Very few Mesoamerican pictorial documents have survived destruction and it is not clear how the Codex Zouche-Nuttall reached Europe. In 1859 it turned up in a Dominican monastery in Florence. Years later, Sir Robert Curzon, 14th Baron Zouche (1810-73), loaned it to The British Museum. His books and manuscripts were inherited by his sister, who donated the Codex to the Museum in 1917. The Codex was first published by Zelia Nuttall in 1902.

Photo credits: Michel wal, dallaschildblog

(via fylatinamericanhistory)

fuckyeahlatinamericanhistory:

A building in Chichen Itza’s Las Monjas complex, photographed by French explorer Désiré Charnay during his first trip to Mexico circa 1857-1861. Charnay, who died on this date in 1915, was one of the very first to photograph pre-Columbian sites in Mesoamerica and South America. In 1863, he published a volume of photographs and engravings of Mayan sites from the south of Mexico entitled Le Mexique: souvenirs et impressions de voyage. It was the first time such images were ever published.

(via fylatinamericanhistory)

The inside.